The same thing in, say, Bulgarian would have allowed me to finish my meal. There’s little chance that anyone but Bulgarians speak Bulgarian. There’s every chance they speak English. We must remember that because, stupidity aside, it obviously works in our favour. In recent days, I’ve been in Lille and then on the Côte d’Azur.

In Lille, I joined a group of other Britons, plus Germans, Italians, Belgians, Dutch and French people. The group language was English on the grounds that a) everybody spoke it as well as their own language; and b) no one could expect the Britons to speak anything else. On the Côte d’Azur, all the guests at a dinner either were, or spoke, French – bar one English lady. So naturally, most conversation was in English.

Like it or not, English is now the world language Photo: GETTY

Foreigners adapt to our linguistic uselessness. As I said, there are reasons. But it still leaves us looking arrogant and impolite. (OK, not as impolite as calling a German stranger “fat-boy”, but I was young – mid-40s – and prone to lapses.) I die a little every time I’m in a Continental café and an Englishman, or American, strides in crying: “Two beers, a couple of milky coffees, oh, and yeah, where’s the loo?” Imagine ordering in French, straight off, in a British pub or American bar. (I once did, in London’s Soho, when I was pretending to be a Frenchman for professional reasons long forgotten. “Sorry mate, we don’t do Frog here,” yelled the barman, proud to be repelling boarders.)

Imagine if a Frenchman strolled into a London boozer and started rattling off orders in his own tongue? Photo: GETTY

But why don’t we do Frog? Or German? Or Italian? As a nation, we’re no more daft than foreigners. If they can manage other languages, so can we. It’s a matter of courtesy. And of safety. In Athens, I met a Greek in a bar. Having ascertained my Greek was rudimentary (“Kalimera, Stavros”), he took us to another bar. There he sat me next to a barely clad lady from Romania. A chap the size of the Parthenon brought across a half-bottle of unspeakable sparkling wine, and a bill for £250. I had to flee this place, too. If only I’d known the Greek for “P--- off”, this could have been avoided.